More Cisco drama as fight with Arista gets personal

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Cisco Systems CEO Chuck Robbins talks during an interview with this newspaper on July 28, 2015 at the Cisco headquarters in San Jose. A lawsuit that Cisco has launched against smaller rival Arista Networks is said to be turning personal at the same time Cisco is dealing with declining sales and antsy investors on Wall Street.

Ex-Family Feud: It’s been a busy week for Cisco Systems. On Wednesday, the networking-equipment giant reported quarterly results that were decent. That is, if you didn’t take into account the fact that the company’s year-over-year sales fell for the third-straight quarter, and Cisco also said that it expects its current-quarter revenue to drop from last year, which would give the company a four-quarter-long losing streak.

And now, it looks like Cisco has gotten itself into a spat almost as worthy of any of the infighting said be going on within President Donald Trump’s staff at the White House.

Cisco’s drama is playing out in court, where the company has sued its much smaller competitor, Arista Networks, for stealing Cisco’s proprietary technology. Arista claims to have done nothing wrong.

What makes the case more of a soap opera is that Arista is headed up by Jayshree Ullal, a former star executive at Cisco, who was a personal favorite of Cisco’s ex-CEO, John Chambers. Since joining Arista in 2008, Ullal has led the company as it has taken at least some of Cisco’s business away from the likes of Facebook and Microsoft. Big accounts with big companies is how Cisco made its bones, and now the company is trying to reclaim that lost business, while also moving into new areas like security and software.

The Slippery Slope?: On Thursday, Cloudflare Chief Executive Matthew Prince was being hailed as a hero in some circles for taking down the website-protection services the company had provided to the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer. Now, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, while not supporting Daily Stormer’s message, has come out saying that we all better beware. The EFF argues that if Cloudflare, Google, GoDaddy and others can choose which “bad guys” they can keep from being online, there’s little to stop them from doing the same with anyone else on the internet.

Bottom of the Lineup:

Life, Death, Facebook: Never mind setting up your will or family trust before you die. What really matters is what happens to your Facebook account, right. Well, Facebook said it is trying to get it right with people’s wishes for how they want their accounts treated in the event of their death. However, the company says it is still working out some of the kinks with the process, especially if a person doesn’t leave any explicit instructions in the account settings before they die.

Rex Crum is the senior web editor for the business section for The Mercury News and Bay Area News Group. He also writes about business and technology for the publications' print and web editions, and has covered business and technology for nearly two decades. A native of Seattle, he remains a diehard Seahawks and Mariners fan and is imparting his fandom to his Oakland-native wife and two young daughters.